A Hundred Thousand Worlds (8 page)

“I
’m sorry,” Gail says. “I thought this was the ladies’ room.”

“You could not be more correct,” says the Diviner, sitting on a stool with one of those electronic cigarettes. “Over half of the ladies at this convention are in this room right here.”

“You’d think we’d get a bigger room,” says OuterGirl from behind a folding panel screen in the corner.

“They do have you crammed in here,” Gail says. It’s so crowded that Flail is on Flog’s lap, although this may be by choice. In the corner, Gail spots Val and waves.

“Hey,” says Val, and Gail takes a moment to assess whether Val is genuinely glad to see her or is being gracious. “You looking for a place to hide out?”

“I’m being chased by a mansplainer,” says Gail.

“Come sit,” says Val, patting the arm of her chair. Gail balances herself next to Val, not quite sitting.

“So this is where the magic happens?” she asks, somewhat awkwardly.

“These girls are better with makeup than anyone I’ve ever worked with,” says Val. “It was much easier to make me look young and glamorous ten years ago. Those guys didn’t know how good they had it.”

“She’s being modest,” says the Astounding Woman, removing her wig so she can re-pin her hair. “She could roll out of bed and go right out there with that face.”

Gail teeters a bit, and Val steadies her. “I should leave you guys to it, then,” she says.

“No, stay,” says Val. “There’s room.”

“Be glad Ferret Lass isn’t here,” Red Emma says. “The girl cannot seem to register the fact she’s wearing an erect three-foot-long tail.”

“Do you need to get changed, hon?” OuterGirl asks Gail.

Gail looks at what they’re all wearing. She’s never delved into cosplay herself, but her friends who have lament that commercial spandex has an inability to mimic the sheen of superhero costumes and ends up making the wearer look more like a Tour de France rider than an alien warrior princess or ninja psychic. Or was it psychic ninja? Those who were into it and had the budget relied on vinyls and thermoplastics for high-gloss, form-fitting—or form-enhancing—costumes. The costume-making process often involved wrapping one’s torso in Saran wrap or aluminum foil, then heating a sheet of space-age polymer over oneself with a hair dryer or heat gun until it molded into shape. Ideally, this was done with the help of a friend, but some of them had burn scars to show for their solo efforts.

These ladies’ costumes, though, were professionally made, custom jobs. Either the girls sank a lot of money commissioning their outfits or someone else paid for them. The material of most of their outfits is high-gloss Milliskin, a fabric Gail has heard described as the Cadillac of cloth polymers. It clings to them as if it were painted on and shines like the scales of a freshly caught fish. The ones who aren’t decked out in tights, or in actual leather and vinyl, wear what appears to be normal clothes, but smaller or shorter or lower-cut, or ripped and frayed in particularly alluring ways. What remains is held on only by willpower or decency. Or, more likely, spirit gum.

Then she looks at what she’s wearing. The jeans she left New York in. Brown shoes she thought of as dressy, but which her brother Ron referred to as “old-lady librarian shoes.” The pair of glasses that had come free with a nicer pair of glasses that she fell asleep wearing six months ago and irreparably bent. A National Comics T-shirt a size too big that she’d
been given as her signing bonus five years ago. The logo, with
NATIONAL
in alternating red and blue letters, hadn’t been updated since the early eighties and was derided by the fans as a symbol of National’s overall dated aesthetic. Gail believed it would soon take on a retro cool, or that the aging fan base would realize they themselves were a little on the dated side, and there was nothing sadder than middle-agers trying to look hip. Anyway, she was waiting it out.

“You’re going out there in that?” asks Spectacle Girl.

“They’ll eat her alive,” says Flail.

“No,” says Flog, stifling a giggle, “they won’t.” This gets a laugh out of the younger girls and a glare out of the older women. Gail feels playground division lines have been drawn and there may be no team for her to join.

“She’s a writer,” says Val.

They all examine Gail, inspecting her costume to decide if it’s convincing.

“Of comic books?” the Diviner asks. Gail nods.

“I didn’t know they had women writers in comics,” says Iota.

“They don’t have many,” Gail tells her.

“What a surprise,” says Red Emma.

“I write
you,
” says Gail, approaching Iota slowly and with a sense of wonder. The costume is intended to look like Iota is mid-shrink: a white lab coat huge at the shoulders but short enough to show off her legs, practically falling off her. It’s a problem Gail has tried to address during her run on the book: Iota’s powers often lead to her ending up tiny, naked, and struggling to cover herself up with a gum wrapper or ginkgo leaf. Gail had Iota create a costume for herself out of unstable molecules, an unexplained but vaguely sciency-sounding substance that would shrink with her whenever she got little. But when Iota is drawn for covers or pinups, she’s clutching some odd piece of minuscule detritus over her unmentionables.

Gail thinks about Geoff’s stories of visiting the set of the Blue Torch
movie, seeing a character he’d written for years come to life. This might not be on such a grand scale, but the girl is perfect—it’s like she stepped right out of a panel and off the page. She knows it’s weird to address this woman as if she is Iota, but she can’t seem to help it.

“I mean, I write the series you’re currently in,” Gail says. “You don’t have your own series.”

“I don’t?” Iota asks.

Gail looks around at the other women in the room, taking stock. “Most of you don’t,” she says. “The Astounding Woman is part of the Astounding Family, which is a group book that hasn’t been published in twenty years. The Diviner and Medea are both in team books, too. OuterGirl shows up in the
OuterMan
books occasionally. Flail and Flog are villains.”

“We’re misunderstood,” says Flog.

“Demonized for our sexuality,” says Flail.

“ExSanguina is in
Sinister,
which is a horror anthology, but she’s only in a couple times a year. The only one of you who has her own title is Red Emma.”

“Suck it, bitches,” says Red Emma.

“But I used to, at least,” says Iota.

“All of you used to,” Gail says. “Even Flail and Flog. Back in the nineties, early two thousands.” She has the feeling she’s in a waiting room between series cancellation and cultural disappearance. Like a scantily clad terminal ward. “They were mostly awful. All tits and ass. But tits and ass sold back then.”

“Tits and ass always sell,” says Flail. Or possibly Flog. Gail adjusts her glasses but still can’t tell them apart.

“Well,” she says, “the supply of tits and ass went up, so the price went down.”

“Fucking Internet,” says Red Emma.

“In a lot of ways,” Gail continues, “things are better now. Female characters are stronger, like Red Emma—”

“Again I say, suck it,” Red Emma says to the room.

“And less explicitly sexualized.” Here they all examine Red Emma, who is fixing the lapels of her trench coat so they reveal only a PG-13 level of cleavage. “But there are fewer female-fronted titles. Even
Red Emma
’s written by a guy.”

“What the fuck?” says Red Emma.

“So why don’t I have my own series anymore?” asks Iota.

“It got canceled four years ago, just before I came on. Editorial decided to fold you into
The Speck
’s regular cast.”

“He’s my boyfriend, right?”

“You read the comics?” Gail asks.

“They give us dossiers,” explains the Diviner. “I, for instance, am an archaeologist who becomes possessed by the prophetic Greek goddess Cassandra.”

“Cassandra’s not a goddess,” says Flog.

“Is that so?” says the Diviner, clearly not interested.

“She’s the daughter of Priam,” says Flail.

“She’s in the
Iliad
,” says Flog, “and she’s murdered in
Agamemnon
.”

“Congratulations, you both pass Who the Hell Cares with straight A’s,” says the Diviner. “I’m telling you what’s in my dossier. I’d love to know what yours say.”

“Did National Comics hire you?” Gail asks Iota.

“The convention organizers hire us,” says Spectacle Girl.

“If you could get any of us a meeting with someone at National,” says OuterGirl, “that’d be amazing.”

“You think some writer is going to get you cast in the next
Vengeance Troop
movie?” says Red Emma. “No offense,” she adds, to Gail.

“I’m so sorry,” says Gail. She looks at Val for help, but Val doesn’t know what’s going on. Gail puts her hand on Iota’s shoulder. “They’re killing you off. In . . . maybe five issues. Just after I leave the book. You get beaten to death by Quietus the Quisling.”

The girl looks horrified. “Why are they killing me off?” she asks. “Do people not like me?”

“It’s for the Speck,” Gail says. “Editorial thinks he’s goofy. Dated. They want to give him motivation. Make him more driven.”

“But what does that have to do with me?” It has nothing to do with this girl who is not Iota the Incredible Shrinking Girl only a passable iteration thereof. But she is in real pain at the thought of her impending death, less than a hundred pages away.

“It’s a fridging. It’s how you motivate a male character,” says Gail, feeling like a mother explaining some of the less pleasant parts of sex to her daughter. “You kill off the woman he loves, then he swears revenge. Maybe her death keeps coming up in flashback, a kind of emotional touchstone moment. But after ten, twelve issues, he meets somebody new and moves on.”

“And what about me?” asks Iota.

“You’ll come back eventually,” Gail assures her. “Dead’s never dead in comics. If you were a male character, you’d fight your way back from the nether-whatever. For you? I’d guess resurrected by scientists after a year, year and a half. Heel turn for six months, then saved by your love for the Speck.”

“Heel turn?” asks OuterGirl.

“You’ll come back evil,” says Gail. “But only for a little bit.”

“You wrote this story?” says Red Emma.

“It hasn’t been written yet,” Gail says. “I’m saying that’s how it’s likely to go down. They informed me of the new editorial direction. I told them I didn’t want to write
The Speck
without Iota in the book. So they took me off the book.”

“But you’re the writer,” says Iota.

“Only as long as they let me be,” says Gail.

“They ever kill off a guy to give a female character motivation?” asks Red Emma, putting the last word in air quotes.

“I’ve never read a story like that,” Gail says.

Red Emma nods and pulls her fedora down over her eyes. She tries to lean back like a weary private detective about to catch some sleep, but there’s no room, and the attempt knocks over the Astounding Woman’s
wig stand. Red Emma pretends not to notice. “Maybe you should write one,” she tells Gail.

“That’s just not how it works,” says Gail. “We work in tropes. Broad, familiar strokes. Women are in the story to get the men where they need to be. Dead lovers and mothers, mostly.”

Through the chair, Gail feels Val give a little shudder.

“Have any of you seen Alex this afternoon?” Val asks.

“S
o tell me more about the boy and his robot,” says Brett. They are heading back from the bookstore, Alex with a copy of
Adam Anti & Nothing but Flowers
tucked under one arm and a too large paper cup of loganberry soda, slick with condensation, gripped in his other hand. When they got to the store, it became clear to Brett that while the kid knew, intellectually, what a loganberry was, he’d never had a loganberry soda. They stopped at a corner store to remedy that, and now the kid’s lips are a vampiric shade of maroon and his teeth pale pink.

“It’s not
his
robot,” Alex says. “It doesn’t belong to him.”

“But he fixed it,” Brett says.

“Just because you fix something,” Alex says, “doesn’t make it yours.” He slurps up the last of his soda. Rattles the straw around to see if there are any dregs left, then lets it hang at the end of his arm. “The boy and the robot,” he says, “go out of the cave and they’re by the ocean. Have you ever been to the ocean?”

“My girlfriend and I went last year,” Brett says. It occurs to him that the kid is making this up as he goes along. He tries to remember if it was like that when he was a kid, if stories came about in real time. They always seemed as if they were fully formed, but maybe it was only that the details, laid one on top of the other over time, became instantly set and immutable.

“You talk about your girlfriend a lot,” the kid says. “What’s she like?”

“She’s actually my ex-girlfriend,” says Brett.

“Do you ever talk to her?”

“Sometimes.”

“Do you miss her?”

Brett shrugs. “Sometimes.”

“Oh.”

As they pass a trash can, Alex drops the cup into it like an afterthought. “What was the ocean like where you went?” he asks.

“It was big,” says Brett. “Biggest thing I’ve ever seen. We were still within sight of New York. But the city looked so small. Like it could fall into the ocean and the ocean wouldn’t notice.”

“That’s a good description,” says Alex. “That’s what it’s like for them, too. And the city is in the distance, just like you said.”

“Which city?” Brett asks. This is the first mention of a city.

“They don’t know,” Alex says. “But they can’t cross the ocean and they can’t go back to the cave.” He pauses at a corner. Brett knows the way back from here, but he waits. Let the kid figure it out himself. Correct him if he goes wrong. But he picks the right way, and they start down the last block back to the hotel. “Can you do a robot voice?” the kid asks.

Brett stops. No one has ever asked him to do a robot voice before. But it turns out it’s the kind of question he’s always wanted someone to ask him. “Does not compute, does not compute,” says Brett in a monotone. Alex considers.

“That’s not what he sounds like,” he says. “Do another one.”

Brett thinks for a minute, then begins flailing his arms wildly and spinning around, yelling, “Danger, Will Robinson, danger!” Alex has to duck to dodge, running around Brett in a circle.

“No!” he says, laughing. “Do a different one.”

“I’m afraid I can’t do that, Dave,” says Brett. It’s not a particularly good HAL impersonation, but it’s unlikely the kid knows that.

“That was scary,” Alex says. They cross the street to the hotel. “Do robots have to sound like robots?”

“I don’t think there’s a rule,” says Brett.

“Then this one doesn’t,” says Alex, pulling open the heavy door to the hotel lobby. “He sounds regular. But he knows stuff. He knows lots of stuff about the city.”

Alex has just started to describe the layout and design of the city the boy and his robot have arrived at, its abandoned golden spires that the boy dimly remembers, when they are attacked by a mob of women, all but one of them in superhero costumes. The one who is not in costume grabs Alex and swoops him into her arms. Clutches him tightly to her. Turns away from the rest of them. Brett recognizes her immediately.

“You’re Alex’s mom,” he says.

“Where have you been?” she says to Alex. Ignores Brett.

“I went to get a book,” he says. Her shoulder muffles the sound.

“You had everyone in a panic,” she says. She rocks him back and forth the way mothers do to get their babies to sleep. Like she’s going through the motions of calming Alex down to calm herself.

“I was at the bookstore,” Alex says.

“Where?” she says. Alex tries to get the map out of his back pocket, but his arms are pinned by her embrace.

“It’s on Larchmere,” says Brett. Half of the costumed women glare at him. Even the Diviner, through her blindfold. He looks at the girl dressed as Ferret Lass for sympathy. She bites her darkened lower lip nervously.

“We were about to call the police,” Val says. Not to anyone in particular, but loudly enough that everyone in the lobby hears.

“I was okay, though,” says Alex. “I was with Brett.” He still sounds bright and happy. But Brett begins to see the severity of the situation. He would back away, but two women in bondage gear stand behind him, arms crossed authoritatively.

“What were you thinking?” Val demands of Brett. She sets Alex down and steps in front of him protectively.

“He said you said it was okay,” says Brett. Now he can’t remember if this is exactly what Alex said.

“And you didn’t think to check?”

Brett thinks of the moment before they left. The wave. He’d read approval into it, but there’d been nothing there. He wonders if the kid tricked him, and if so how willing to be tricked he had been. He looks at Val, wanting to apologize. Two nights ago, he was flirting with her in the hotel bar. Badly, but still. She bears down on him as if she were his own mother, and Brett feels like he’s shrinking. Regressing to Alex’s age in front of an audience he notices now includes Fred, who watches over Ferret Lass’s furry shoulder pad.

“I should have you arrested,” Val says.

“He didn’t do anything,” says Alex from behind her.

“You could have gotten him killed.”

“It seems like everybody’s okay,” says Ferret Lass, not quite stepping in front of Brett, but putting a hand on his chest and pulling him away from Val.

“Stay out of it,” warns the Diviner.

“I’m sorry,” says Brett. “I didn’t think—”

“It’s okay,” Ferret Lass says to him quietly.

“He didn’t
do
anything,” says Alex. He steps between Val and Brett. His cheeks are flushed, and his huge brown eyes are full. They glisten like glass marbles in a fishbowl. “He took me to the bookstore to get my book. Because
you wouldn’t
.” He throws this at her like an accusation.

“Alex, go upstairs,” she says softly, still looking at Brett.

“He’s my
friend,
” says Alex, crying now, “and he’s helping me with my story.” He is such an abject little thing that Brett wants to pick him up and hold him. He knows that if Val would look at Alex right now, her heart would break the same way Brett’s is breaking and everything would be all right.

“Alex, go upstairs,” she says again, louder. Alex stands there for a second. Still below her line of vision. He stares at her, then at Brett, then runs off. Once he is gone, the fight goes out of Val. When she speaks, her voice is quiet. Without panic or malice.

“I don’t want you talking to him again, do you understand? I know you
were trying to help him. I know. But we’re fine. We’re fine, and we don’t need any help.” She walks past Brett. She very softly thanks the other women, who form a buffer between Brett and Val. Keeping the two of them apart. None of them look angry with him, just pitying. It’s a basic rule of nature: you don’t come between a mama bear and her cub. The looks they give him call him out for not knowing that, or not remembering. Sometimes the simplest rules are the hardest to remember, proscriptions grow vague and milky from a lifetime of disuse. Over shoulders bare and caped, he can see Val making her slow and deliberate way up the stairs.